The Bleed Effect
by Dark Akuma Hunter
Summary: What Sothis hadn't told them - what perhaps even she herself had not known - was that, if you used the divine pulse around the same person too many times, they started to develop an awareness of it.


**The Bleed Effect:**

_I._

Teaching had never been a part of the future Byleth envisioned. True, they never spared much time to ponder the future in any sort of depth in the first place, nor had they had any fanciful daydreams about shifting careers away from the mercenary lifestyle, but it remained true that _teaching_ had never once crossed their mind.

Still, their father seemed reluctant to disobey the church in church territory, and if Jeralt was staying put then so was Byleth. It only seemed logical, then, to follow whatever decision the church came to for what Byleth should do for them.

(Byleth couldn't help but agree with Seteth's disdain for the decision though. Why them? Why as a Head of House teacher, and not simply a weapons instructor? Why teach at all?

Sothis complained that all Byleth's worrying made it hard for her to sleep, so they compartmentalised. They were a teacher now. That was all there was to it in the end.)

_II._

It would be a lie for Byleth to claim that their pick of house hadn't been at least a little bit at random.

What were they supposed to do, though?

Rhea had, essentially, kicked them out of the meeting and told them to wander the monastery, meet the students, and report back with a decision the next day. It felt a little irresponsible. They would have felt better about it if Rhea had just handed them their assignment, instead of making them choose.

The house leaders all seemed so earnest and eager that Byleth really wasn't sure what to do.

Taking into consideration Seteth's attitude towards them, Byleth would guess that none of the other professors on staff that were up for the Head of House role were nearly as young as they were (however young that truly was). It made sense then, that the students would be interested in the young mercenary they'd just seen in battle rather than whoever else they might get stuck with. But _their_ interest wasn't helping Byleth decide anything.

Because all three of them wanted Byleth's attentions, they had to rule that factor out of their decision-making process. There was no easy favouritism to be found there. Instead of considering what they wanted from Byleth, Byleth tried to tease out what they might have to offer to any of the house leaders.

Claude and Edelgard both struck Byleth as incredibly strong-willed individuals. That wasn't to say that they thought Dimitri was weak-willed; there was just something about Dimitri's demeanour that gave Byleth the sense that maybe he craved guidance more than the other two did.

Byleth didn't know if teenagers would find it easier or even _more_ difficult to confide in a professor who was reasonably close to them in age. For better or for worse, there was only one way to find out, and that was through action.

And thus they took the Blue Lions under their wing.

_III._

Byleth learned two things about one Felix Hugo Fraldarius in rapid succession.

One: he was an incredibly skilled swordsman.

Two: he was always, _always_ itching for a fight.

Byleth learned this the day after they took up their post teaching the Blue Lions, when Felix challenged them to a sparring match – no doubt looking to discover if Byleth had the skill to back up their unusual posting – and then, after being soundly defeated (skill or no skill, Byleth had long years of battle experience to back them up), he continued to demand more and more spars whenever he thought Byleth looked free.

Sometimes they indulged him, because his drive was so much more _mercenary_ than anyone else Byleth now found themselves in the company of and there was something a little comforting in that.

Other times, they didn't. Byleth was still new to this whole teaching thing, but they were pretty sure that spending all of their time doting on one student and essentially, by proxy, ignoring all the rest was not the way to go about it.

Still, they were early days. They'd figure it out eventually.

_IV._

The first time Byleth consciously utilised a divine pulse, the first time one of their students was grievously injured, it was Mercedes.

Byleth had spent the entirety of their life fighting in tandem with other people. In that sense, taking command had never felt like a big step out of their comfort zone. But they had never been in the field with such green mages before; the few members of Jeralt's mercenary group who specialised in magic without secondary weapons had been battle-hardened long before Byleth first met them.

Fighting with greenhorns, it seems, was a severe gap in Byleth's expertise. The mock battle between the three houses and the practice sessions with the Knights of Seiros had _not_ been adequate preparation for a real battlefield.

(They would rectify that before their next field op, no matter how many sleepless nights it took them to rework all of their old strategies to account for their fresh-faced student soldiers.)

In a perhaps ill-advised attempt at a flanking manoeuver with such unexperienced combatants, the Lions had spread themselves too thin across an open plateau.

Mercedes was a half-dozen metres at least from the closest fighter, and they were all engaged in combat with the bandits. Unfortunately, the bandits outnumbered them, and they knew it.

Byleth caught the scene from the corner of their vision, turning with it too late to do anything but watch the first time around.

One of the bandits took the chance, while the others were preoccupied and unable to react, to duck around their front line and march on Mercedes' blind spot. She'd been so focused on preparing healing magic in the event of an emergency that by the time she noticed and tried to shoot off a _Nosferatu_ there was already a sword plunged straight into her gut.

Byleth couldn't remember who screamed at that.

It might have been them.

The details were a little hazy around there. They weren't sure how much time passed before they remembered – through Sothis screaming in their head – about the divine pulse. What they did remember was the blur of the world as they wound back time; the way they ripped the bow off their back as they pivoted to face across the battleground; the look of shock on Mercedes' face as the arrow tore past her and embedded itself in that vile bandit's throat.

It was not a good day.

If one positive thing arose from the harrowing experience, it was to reinforce in Byleth's mind to _never_ allow their mages to become separated from the group. Just because they _could_ undo injuries it didn't mean they should actively seek them out.

_V._

The second divine pulse was for Felix.

While outside of freak accidents the number of pulses Byleth utilised on the other Lions remained fairly low, Felix's numbers only continued to climb.

_VI._

Felix was an incredibly fast person.

Byleth had always thought _they_ were pretty quick on their feet, and in an organised foot-race they would probably be evenly matched, but therein lay the problem.

The battlefield was no racetrack.

It wasn't only Felix's running speed that was impressive, but his reactionary speed. He could spot an opening to charge some distant enemy and burst into motion in the time it took Byleth to blink. Once he was in motion, all Byleth could do was chase; there was no catching up until he was locked into stationary combat.

Felix could play the good soldier when he felt like it, but the longer a battle carried on the less inclined he was to obediently follow Byleth's directions. When he went off on his own there was really nothing Byleth could do other than have faith in the others to look after each other while they raced off to make sure Felix was never entirely alone in enemy territory.

One of the very few times Byleth had left Felix to fend for himself, trying to trust in his skills, he ran into an ambush.

They surrounded him, axes and swords at the ready, and the outcome had been as devastating as one might expect. He'd gone down swinging, but nothing within Byleth could make that into a positive.

Felix's knee-jerk fight or flight response was _always _fight. Byleth wasn't sure Felix even _had_ a flight response – not when facing physical danger at any rate. It was a serious hazard to his own health.

He only had two saving graces: that he was incredibly skilled, and that Byleth could erase his mistakes for him.

Unfortunately he only knew about the first, and so he was never forced to truly realise exactly how much danger he was putting himself in.

_VII._

Byleth had felt grief before, although in a much more distant, detached fashion.

Growing up, the mercenary life was all they really knew, and that sort of life was filled with death. People who strove to be professional mercenaries knew that any day, any mission, could be their last.

Jeralt's company were close-knit – or at least they seemed that way to Byleth, who had never been accused of being great at interpreting social cues or reading into relationships – but at the end of the day they were professionals. If one of their number fell they would take a night after the mission ended, hold a ceremony of sorts, reminisce and probably get more drunk than they normally would, and then come daybreak they would shake it off and go back to work.

It sounded cold, but for Byleth at least, grief for the dead was something they knew how to deal with.

What troubled them now, on the other hand, was the drowning weight of grief for those who _weren't actually dead_.

On bad days, sometimes Byleth would look at one of their students only for them to be overtaken by the image of their bloodied corpse. On those days, the monastery felt like a graveyard full of ghosts.

Byleth's only saving grace in this was that their emotions had never held much sway over their facial expressions, and no one seemed to notice the tightening of their eyes or the press of their lips as they tried to ignore the after-images of deaths prevented.

Worst of all, where they would normally seek out their father to speak on emotional matters that they either didn't understand or were personally struggling with – a more common occurrence now, when those emotions had suddenly become bigger things with a heavy presence ever since stepping foot on monastery grounds – they couldn't possibly find it within them to try and explain this twisted situation to Jeralt. If they sought him out for silent comfort, unexplained, it would only worry him in turn.

They did not both need to suffer for the gift Sothis had given them to fix their own mistakes.

_VIII._

Byleth had personally felt the cold fingers of death so many times now that they worried occasionally that they were losing the ability to fear their own death.

It was pure arrogance to believe they were infallible just because they could exercise a modicum of control over the flow of time; even if they hadn't expended their divine pulses, if a mortal blow knocked them unconscious then they were done for unless Sothis could manipulate the strands of time from within their unresponsive body.

Byleth didn't _want_ to die.

It hurt, every single time. Agonising. Searing. Lingering.

Their dreams, which used to be filled with that bloody battle and Sothis' vague figure, became a morbid Best Of collection of all the ways they – or one of their students – had nearly died. This wasn't every night, thankfully, but they were Byleth's only dreams.

So no, Byleth really wasn't looking for death any time soon, thanks.

_But_, if a choice had to be made, Byleth or the Lions, they knew what they would choose. Had chosen, over and over again. Would continue to choose, until there was no longer a need for it, or until they succumbed to the permanence of death for real.

Byleth would not let them die.

_IX._

The better Byleth became at manipulating time, the more pulses they had at their disposal, the harder it sometimes felt to maintain their resolve.

It was monstrously difficult to experience devastating injuries, rewind to a time before you received them, and immediately switch back into battle mode while somewhere inside of you a voice was still panicking about the hole that was no longer in your gut or the eye that was no longer blinded.

Byleth soldiered on, because they were a mercenary through and through, and more than that now they were a battlefield commander who couldn't afford to be wrong-footed in the middle of conflict when there were people relying on them for direction.

Byleth kept their silent vow to protect the students at the cost of their own life, but it was _hard_.

Exhausting.

Draining.

They rewound and carried on regardless.

_X._

Byleth stumbled across Felix in the training grounds the day after they returned to the monastery from their most recent outing.

That wasn't strange. If you were looking for Felix, the first place anyone would suggest was the training grounds.

But Felix was standing still and silent in the centre of the room, a training sword lying forgotten at his feet. He didn't appear to notice when Byleth entered, and for a moment they considered calling out to him. That thought derailed quickly when they saw the way Felix was almost absently running a hand along his abdomen.

A chill ran down Byleth's spine.

Felix was tracing the exact path that a bandit's axe had taken when it had gutted him two days ago.

But there shouldn't be a wound, a scar, even the slightest indication of anything untoward. Byleth had undone that. Several times, in fact.

Unbidden, their own hand drifted to their waist.

(In their first attempt at saving Felix they had messed up the timing, stumbled their footing, and been brutally side-swiped by the same axe that had been headed for Felix. Panic still occasionally bogged down their reaction speed, and this had been one of those times.

The axe had dug in deep. In all honesty, feeling the bandit wrench it back out had hurt worse than the initial blow itself. But those were all physical pains. At the end of the day, they were well-versed in pain.

What hurt worse was the way Felix had frozen up behind them.

Byleth hadn't bothered killing the bandit in retaliation, since they were about to turn back time, but they couldn't help glancing back over their shoulder as their knees buckled. Felix was ashen-faced, eyes wide with something Byleth hadn't had the mental capacity to interpret in the moment, grip slack on his sword. Felix had jerked into motion, as if to catch them, but Byleth hadn't the time to linger. They had a fight to win.)

In front of them, the real Felix – whole, alive, unmarred – tensed suddenly, gaze whipping towards the entrance. In their dreadful reminiscence Byleth must have made some sort of sound to alert him to their presence.

Felix's fingers dug into the fabric of his shirt, clawing over the invisible memory of an injury. There was a fierce look in his eyes; Byleth didn't even notice they were still cupping their waist until they followed the direction of his gaze.

Somewhat alarmed, they jerked their hand away.

"_You_," Felix snarled, stomping towards them, sword left in the dust.

There was something dark in his voice.

There was always _something_ dark in his voice when he spoke, but that was just the way Felix talked to most people. This felt different. Pointed. There because of _Byleth_, not Felix.

Byleth clenched their fists at their side in an attempt to stifle their reflexive urge to hide from Felix's gaze.

Goddess, if only Sothis could be awake at times like this instead of always sleeping the days away in the back of their mind somewhere.

"Felix?"

He glanced up briefly at the sound of their voice, but his gaze was quickly drawn back to their side as if magnetised. Felix looked like he wanted to tear at their shirt and prod at their skin, but how could he possibly _know_ to feel that way?

Startled, Byleth couldn't keep from shifting their weight to their back foot, moving ever-so-slightly backwards, away from Felix's intensity.

Of course he noticed.

Felix pointed an accusatory finger at Byleth. "You're injured." His other hand crept back to his stomach and something in his voice shifted. "_I'm_ injured."

A shocked burst of panic washed over Byleth.

"What?"

They reached forward instinctively, calling a heal into one hand. Had they missed something? Had the divine pulse, Goddess forbid, malfunctioned somehow? Had he simply noticed an injury after returning to the monastery that he hadn't noticed in the heat of battle?

Felix batted their hands away, something darkly triumphant in his gaze.

"Show me," he demanded.

Byleth blinked at him, magic fizzling away into nothingness. They were so incredibly lost. Battlefield tactics and reading the flow of battle was one of their specialities, but they'd never been great at following conversational leaps.

"Show you… what?" Slowly Byleth lifted a hand to their side. "This?"

Felix gave a sharp nod.

Byleth's fingers tightened, clenching the fabric as they recalled the sensation of blood dripping down their side.

_There's nothing there_, they briskly reprimanded. _Don't make a big deal out of it_.

Taking a deep breath Byleth shifted their grip to tug up the edge of their shirt.

The skin they revealed to Felix's sharp gaze was far from unmarred – they had been in far too many skirmishes to count, and no one was lucky 100% of the time – but it did lack the one injury Byleth suddenly felt like they both expected to see when they looked at it.

Instead of disappointment however this just seemed like… validation.

"You've been favouring your side since the end of the mission," Felix explained as he took a step back, apparently satisfied with whatever he had or hadn't seen.

Byleth tugged their shirt back down, feeling oddly self-conscious all of a sudden.

"Have I?" Byleth asked, voice flat. "I hadn't noticed. As you can see I'm not injured."

"Exactly. Neither am I." Felix pressed his palm flat against his stomach again. "You're a hardened warrior. You don't fake injuries. But your body _thinks_ it's injured. Just like mine does."

"If you're in pain you shouldn't overexert yourself," Byleth interjected, attempting to derail Felix's train of thought. "You should get yourself checked out by Manuela just to be safe."

Felix's face twisted.

"Do _not_ dismiss me. Dismiss _this_."

Felix took an angry step forward. Byleth took a nervous step back. Over and over, until Byleth's back was pressed to the door.

"I _see_ it. Every time I close my eyes. Me: impaled. You: bleeding out _right in front of me_." Felix's voice cracked. He smacked his fist into the wood near Byleth's head.

This was getting out of hand.

Byleth had never seen Felix like this before. They'd seen a glimpse of it, perhaps, in the brief moments after Rodrigue Fraldarius left the monastery when Felix had told them about his brother and his bitter feelings towards his father, but this was more.

Terrified anger without the distance of four years to bury the grief.

Byleth could keep shutting him down. Tell him it was a nightmare, that he was imagining things. Say something pointless about how this was no way to treat one of his teachers.

They could do it, but Felix would _never_ trust them again.

("Why was this happening?" they wailed in the back of their mind, wishing that Sothis had answers for them. This was never supposed to happen.)

Byleth swallowed thickly, squared their shoulders, and tilted their head just so to meet Felix's desperate gaze.

"Felix." They paused, searching for the right words. "That… You may be right, but the important thing is that we're both here in one piece, right now. Neither of us is physically injured. That is our current reality."

Byleth could tell Felix had questions. How could he not? Without any of the details it was such a ridiculous idea, and the concept didn't suddenly become easier to swallow when you understood what was happening – Byleth could attest to that.

But it wasn't a question that fell from his lips.

"Don't you dare do that again," Felix hissed, shoulders hunched. "_No one_ is throwing their life away for me."

His arms were trembling, both hands pressed against the wood, holding him up.

To go straight from Byleth's half-assed confirmation to believing unshakably in something he still had no explanation or words for, Felix must have been mulling it over in his head for longer than they'd expected.

"I don't make promises I can't keep," Byleth told him, a hint of melancholy in their voice. "Also, it's not throwing my life away. Not like this," they pressed a hand to their side, "and not even if that is how I eventually meet my permanent end."

"_Promise me,_" Felix pressed, wild-eyed.

Byleth raised their hands to grip Felix's shoulders.

"No," they said again, apologetic but firm. "Felix I know that's not what you want to hear, I do, but I'm not going to lie to you. If it's within my power to protect any one of you from a premature death, I will do _whatever_ it takes. That isn't a decision I would've made before I came to the monastery. It's entirely based in emotion, from the well of affection that has grown unencumbered within me over every day I've spent here. I should be skilled enough to save you without just taking the hit myself. If I'm ever not, that's on me, not you."

Felix looked away, shoulders tense beneath Byleth's palms. If he was the sort of person to grind his teeth, Byleth mused, he would be doing it now.

"I will _never_ forgive you if you get yourself killed," Felix vowed. It was a reasonable concession, all things considered.

"I would never ask it of you."

_XI._

Despite what many people might class as evidence to the contrary, Byleth didn't believe that Felix had a death wish. Byleth knew this because they had seen the look on Felix's face when the realisation sank in that the dreams he'd been having were not dreams at all but memories of averted disasters.

Felix did not want to die, in the same way that Byleth didn't want to die.

What he _wanted_ was to be in control of his own existence, of his own end.

That kind of sentiment, at least, was something Byleth could sympathise with.

_XII._

There was something strange about it, after that.

Through strained discussion Byleth discovered that Felix couldn't remember _every_ instance of divine pulse usage. He could only recall his own deaths and, alarmingly, Byleth's. Setting aside the question of when exactly Felix began to suspect something was wrong – because he wouldn't have confronted them without feeling sure about himself – there was no reason Felix should have to suffer the sight of his dead classmates and friends haunting his every moment. Remembering his own suffering was burden enough.

Byleth wasn't entirely sure how to feel about it all.

People liked to say pretty things like 'a burden shared is a burden halved,' but Byleth was in no way shape or form _happy_ to have placed this knowledge on Felix's shoulders. On the other hand, there was something a little heartening about knowing there was _someone_ out there who could see Byleth was suffering and actually knew and understood the reason why.

They never talked about it again after that. Neither Felix nor Byleth were big on conversation, especially about emotionally fraught topics.

Things did change though.

Felix made a point to restrain himself on the battlefield, to try and limit the chance of forcing Byleth to use a pulse and be all self-sacrificial for his sake. It bewildered the rest of the Blue Lions to no end, because no one had any idea what had sparked this change of heart in the swordsman, but they all accepted it as the positive that it was.

And, after missions where misfortune _did _befall either Byleth or Felix, they would come together for long, hard sparring sessions to remind each other that they were both still in one piece.

For those of the mercenary mind-set, crossing swords was still the best and most efficient way to communicate. No one could pry their secrets from their swords, after all.

* * *

**A/N:** Listen I love Felix a lot but I cannot control that boy when I'm playing. Every time I play strategically with him for too long a voice in the back of my head starts chanting "Let Fe stab someone" so you can blame this whole thing on that.

This was meant to be a more Felix-heavy story but it mostly ended up being Byleth angsting about things, oops XD I wrote the summary for what I intended the story to be but the focus kind of veered away from that as the main point of the fic but I didn't want to have to think up another summary so... Also this ended up way longer than I expected it to be. First fic of the new decade: is this a sign of good things to come? Probably not.

Hit me up on tumblr aj-writes-fic


End file.
